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Those first nights, she was homesick. She cried in her bed after lights-out, sobs she hoped the pillow muffled so that her roommate, some rich girl from New Jersey with clothes she could only dream about, would not hear. She felt unmoored suddenly and thought that perhaps she had made a terrible mistake. In Craftsbury she had been the smartest girl in town, and while there were lots of smart kids here, there were also dozens of rich kids, and this she was less prepared for: how much money meant. From the moment she arrived she saw that the culture was different. She didn’t have the right stuff. Not only the right clothes, but also the right albums and the right posters. She had nothing she should have had, and for a day or two this was enough to cause her face to break out in a way it never had before, and this only exacerbated her sense of loneliness, and she wanted to go home.

But then classes started, and she liked the small classes, and it was different from Craftsbury — students spoke out, and soon she did, too. Sports were mandatory, and she signed up for field hockey and she was not much for sports, but she liked that the choices were made for her. In other words, it was not a question of whether she would play sports or whether she was good at sports, but instead which one would she choose.

But when the clear structure of the weekdays dissipated in the evenings and on the weekends, she felt exposed, and she was painfully aware of how she stood on the outside of things at Lancaster. She joined the other girls who didn’t have boyfriends — or invites to the city or ski houses or wherever the campus emptied to on weekends — in the sad TV room with its tired furniture, where they ate ice cream in their pajamas and watched whatever dreck the television spat out. She saw girls on her hall readying themselves for that half hour of freedom after study hall when some cute boy waited for them outside and the two of them would move out together into the darkness. She longed to be one of them. But instead the TV room became her room outside her room, and she couldn’t help but notice that the girls in her position were also the outsiders — the foreign girls; the scholarship girls; the girls who had decided, or had it decided for them more likely, that their Lancaster would be limited to the classroom and the athletic fields.

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But then, after she was there a month, something extraordinary happened. She was invited to an off-campus party. A girl, the daughter of faculty members, hosted it. Her parents were away, and the invitations were exclusive, hers whispered to her by a senior girl in her dorm who had never spoken to her before, with the message that if she were to tell anyone else, her invite would be rescinded.

“Why me?” she asked.

The girl smiled. “Someone wants you there.”

It was a Saturday night, and curfew was not until eleven. She kept the secret and did not know who else who would be at the party, beyond the girl who had whispered the invite to her. The house was one of the white Colonials down on the main street, and she arrived at seven, just as the dusk was settling on the early fall night. The girl whose parents owned the house opened the door for her, and she was led into the back living area, where about fifteen students were sitting around on sofas drinking beer and smoking cigarettes. They looked up when she came in, but the conversation continued. She felt awkward and unsure what do with herself. Then one girl whom she had seen around campus, tall and pretty with long, straight black hair, came over to her and said, “You’re Betsy?”

“Yes.”

“I’m Kenna. Want a beer?”

It was an act of kindness, reaching out and bringing her across the breach, and she smiled and said, “Sure,” and soon she had found a spot on one of the couches. Crosby, Stills and Nash harmonized on a stereo in the corner, and a joint was being passed around. The conversation was about Nixon, and as she listened to the easy, intelligent banter, it occurred to her how much they were children playing adults, mimicking their parents with their cigarettes and their beer and their talk of politics and war.

The joint made its way to her, and she looked at it as Kenna handed it to her and she shook her head and passed it on.

“Hey,” a boy across the way said. “You don’t smoke?” He had slightly longish brown hair and wore a tattered corduroy jacket. Suddenly all eyes were on her.

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“Leave her alone, Arthur,” her new friend, Kenna, said.

So this was Arthur Winthrop, she thought, the headmaster’s son. She gazed across at him, across the smoke, and said, “No. Is there a problem?”

He shrugged. “Nah,” he said, “no problem. What do I care if you partake?”

“Okay, then,” Betsy said, and around her everyone laughed, and she felt that she had won something.

A little bit later she found herself in front of a large goldfish tank. The ten or so goldfish all seemed to be standing in place at different depths, as if stuck. Their tails wagged like dogs. She was watching them intently and didn’t hear Arthur until he was right next to her.

“Do you think we are like those fish?” he said. “And the earth is a tank?”

She looked at him. “Don’t be obvious,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, ‘Don’t be obvious.’”

He stepped back. “Wow. Are you always this tough?”

“It depends.”

“On?”

“Who’s bothering me.”

“Do you want me to leave you alone?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Good, ‘cause you’re sort of pretty.”

“Sort of? That’s a hell of a compliment.”

“I just meant you have nice green eyes.”

“You don’t do this much, do you?”

“Do what?”

“Talk to girls.”

He laughed. “I can see we didn’t start well. I’m Arthur Winthrop.”

“I know who you are.”

“Oh, good, and you are Betsy?”

“Betsy Pappas.”

“Betsy Pappas. Where are you from, Betsy Pappas?”

“Craftsbury.”

“Craftsbury what?”

Now it was her turn to laugh. “Craftsbury, Vermont. It’s only an hour from here.”

“Which way?”

“North.”

“I never go north.”

“You really are a snot, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I guess I am.”

She suppressed a smile and watched a goldfish in front of her, its eyes like tiny marbles. “At least you know yourself. Not many people can say that, you know.”

“Self-awareness is one of my strengths,” he said, and grinned, and she permitted herself a look at him. He had good teeth, a strong jaw, even if his brown eyes were a little small.

“Well, I feel safe here,” she said.

“You do?”

“Yes. The headmaster’s son. Who’s going to bust this party?”

“You don’t know my father.”

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“Would he kick his son out of school?”

She saw him considering this. “No, probably not. But my life would not be easy.”

“You mean like it is now?”

“You can presume to say that my life is easy?”

“Isn’t it?”

He kicked his head back and laughed heartily. She looked at him and then back to the goldfish.

“Yes,” he said. “I suppose it is. But you’re tough, you know that?”

“I’m just not good at being a girl,” Betsy said.

Later he walked her home, and when he left her at the front door of her dorm, she wanted him to kiss her, but she was not going to let him know that. Before he had an opportunity, she stuck out her hand, and he shook it and then shook his head and laughed. She laughed, too, at the formality of this parting, a shared joke. He walked away into the fall night, and she stood there for a while, watching the breeze swirl leaves in the yellow lamplight, oblivious to the rush of girls who moved past her and into the dorm to check in for the night.

It is obvious what she saw in Arthur. She wanted to belong to Lancaster more than anything, to feel the old school run through her like a river, and who better to give her that than Arthur?

The school was not only in his blood, it was his blood, and he was so comfortable there because he had always been there, and because — though he never said this to her until much later, when she visited him at Yale — he already knew he would return and become his father, as his father had, once, become his father.

There is a silly immortality to the boarding school life, and isn’t that what she wanted? To know forever the happiness she knew in those two short years when she was a student? Not to have to worry about shopping or meals or where they would live? All that would be taken care of. Teaching — even running a boarding school — is another form of arrested adolescence. Even in their responsibilities, they are all playing Peter Pan, the real world something that happens outside these ivy-covered walls.

They are in Boston. She is sixteen years old, and in the school’s eyes this is an illegal trip. Well, the first part of the trip is not, for Arthur is accompanying his father to an alumni event and manages to convince the headmaster that Betsy would be the perfect student to bring. After the event, she signs out to meet her parents, who she says are in the city. Arthur’s story is that he will be staying with a friend in Cambridge. The ride down for her is awkward, sitting in the front seat — at his father’s insistence — with the headmaster himself. She has seen him only from a distance before, and in her mind he is a great man. He must be a great man, for it is inconceivable to her that anyone less than that would be entrusted with running a school like Lancaster.

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Arthur sits in the back, and on the way down Mr. Winthrop grills her about her family, her view of Lancaster, what her dreams and aspirations are. It is an interview of sorts, and she is nervous both to be talking to him — looking straight ahead as she does, at the road disappearing beneath the tires — and to know that Arthur is hearing the version of her story she would tell to his father but not necessarily to him. Not that she would lie per se, but she might color things differently, emphasize parts of her experience more than others, but with his father that is an impossibility. The idea of trying to shape her narrative with him she cannot even fathom. She tells it to him straight.

That night, they attend the alumni gathering. From high up in the Prudential Building the lights of the city and the harbor glimmer far below. She is in love with all this, with her clothes and even with the older male alumni who never knew what it was like to have girls on campus and who have all kinds of questions for her, some of them flirty, a situation she is old enough to recognize and even give into a little bit.

She is worried Mr Winthrop will want to see her safely into her parent’s hands, but he seems oblivious, and an hour later she is walking in the seasonably warm night down streets lined with lanterns, past brownstones with bright windows that loom over the leaf-swept sidewalks. Arthur has taken her hand, and looking up at him, she knows she will sleep with him tonight if he wants her to, not only because she has grown to find him handsome, but also because she wants this passage in her life, wants to cross this threshold that seems to be the final thing between her and full-fledged, glorious adulthood.

On Newbury Street he finally turns and kisses her, and she responds forcefully to his tongue against her teeth, and she is aware of people moving past them on the sidewalk and she imagines how they must look: the timelessly romantic couple thrust together on this beautiful street, entwined in each other’s arms like experienced lovers.

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The hotel is his idea — there had been vague talk of staying at Harvard with a friend of his from last year’s Lancaster class — and taking his arm as they come into the grand lobby with its marble friezes and its high ceiling painted like a Renaissance sky, she feels her heart quicken and a flush come to her cheeks. You are not in Craftsbury anymore, my dear, she whispers to herself, and Arthur leans down and says, “What?” but she only smiles at him. “Nothing,” she says.

Arthur negotiates the reservation desk like he is born to it and upstairs he orders a bottle of wine, and she says, “Won’t they card us?”

“Not in the room,” he says, and then they are drinking wine and toasting the city outside the window, and when they end up rolling together on the bed, she surprises him by not throwing up any defenses, and even encouraging him, taking him into her warm hand and feeling him leap like a fish against her palm.

She says, “Do you have something?”

He reaches for his wallet, and she is both pleased he is prepared and concerned when he turns it over and she sees the ring pressed into the leather, the presumptuousness of it, but then, as if reading her look when he takes it out, the wrapper crinkled with age, he says, “It’s fine. Been there a year, but it’s fine, see?”

She turns away toward the window, toward the yellowish light of the pulsing city as he takes it out, and when he climbs on top of her, she is prepared for it to hurt, but miraculously it doesn’t, and she wants to enjoy it, but that is not possible, either. Instead, she is rather indifferent to it, this first time, and this bothers her, since she has imagined extremes of either pain or pleasure, and the truth is sadly ambiguous. It shouldn’t be so banal, she thinks, becoming a woman. She wonders what the big deal is. She likes his weight on her, that much is true, the smell of him, his earnestness as he moves over her. But when it is done, she is concerned that she might weep or break out in laughter — oddly she could go either way — and she hopes that she won’t, but then, just as quickly, the feeling passes. A moment later he is off her, and it is like it never happened.

He rolls onto his back. They are side by side, staring at the ceiling. He is breathing hard, and she thinks about this, that he has just done something, something like work. What has she done?

Outside, the sounds of the city move to the foreground, the scream of cars and the cries of a siren. Voices that drift up into the fallen night.

This excerpt from “The Headmaster’s Wife” is reprinted by permission of the publisher, Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, and author Thomas Christopher Greene.